Hovering over this thread, especially as it relates to language, is the standard indirect realist view that everything is a construction, if not social, that "river", for instance, as a concept or as a word we use, is a procrustean bed we force some inchoate bits of reality into.

One other thought on bosses and ladders: his ordering me up is in itself interesting. Giving a command based on a belief -- we can suppose he honestly believes the ladder is safe -- is another way of acting, just like making an assertion that the ladder is safe.

But if your boss tells you to climb the ladder and assures you that it is safe, then the boss is the one liable to pay compensation when you get hurt. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ah, sorry, by "authority" I didn't mean someone in a position to order me to climb, but someone I considered an expert, whose opinion I trusted.

So this is a type of confidence, which is real confidence because we have confidence in the authorities, but at the same time it isn't a true confidence, because we are just letting someone else make the decision for us. It is confidence in another person, not self-confidence. — Metaphysician Undercover

I get why you're saying this, but I don't see any justification for it. Not the right kind of confidence? You're just defining your way to the conclusion you're already committed to.

I think I've lost track of the point your trying to make. — Metaphysician Undercover

Okay, so backing up: trying to clarify the relation between a belief held with some degree of confidence based on certain reasons, and acting on that belief by asserting it. We've been looking at the different sorts of consequences an assertion can have, which should factor into the decision to make an assertion or not. (For instance, the sort of common-sense view here would be you make an assertion with the intent of "inducing" a belief in your audience. I haven't really addressed this yet because this vaguely causal way of putting it doesn't feel right and I don't have an alternative yet.)

I'm now reading Ramsey's "Truth and Probability" which deals with at least some of this. He gets from Peirce the idea that your degree of belief is the extent to which you are willing to act on it, which for me would include making an assertion. There's something obviously right about this, but it misses out some other things. (For instance, with my story-telling example, the princess not existing is indeed a reason for asserting that she won't do anything, but there are other reasons for not making this assertion that are usually better. If you were dealing with someone who actually thought, incorrectly, that the story was true, you would say things like this. This is what happens in Toy Story.)

Or am I totally missing your point? — Mongrel

It does look that way.

Did you mention that exactly halfway is where the rate of increase peaks, so is also exactly where the rate of decrease first starts? — apokrisis

max at the saddle point — Srap Tasmaner

Not exactly, and thanks for this clarification:

single grains do start to make a clear difference at the critical threshold of any such phase change — apokrisis

And big thanks for telling me what this is! I just made this up. I didn't know this is called a "logistic function." (Was hoping you'd come along with info like this.)

But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.) — Srap Tasmaner

Stumbled across this today while working nearby:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute[1] have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. — Wikipedia

Holy crap. My little Excel "simulations" weren't quite this scary.

Apologies -- I thought your post was another from @WISDOMfromPO-MO.

Anyway, your description is appealing.

(Btw, I hope it's obvious to you why I'm thinking about this.)

The percentage of the puzzle completed would be linear to each piece placed. — Srap Tasmaner

True, but the marginal increase in the percentage of the puzzle finished does get smaller. Forgot about that.

Could the peak at the right red mark and the leveling to its right be the soil where a Kuhnian paradigm shift is planted? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I don't think so. I think this model is purely internal, whereas my dim memory of Kuhn was that he's looking at external factors too.

The graph could reflect the process of evidence gathering rather than observers' marginal confidence in the evidence. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I would guess this would follow more of a bell curve -- if we did time along x and evidence gathered on y -- like most projects: slow startup, fruitful middle period, and then less and less evidence gathering since the induction is more or less established.

Kind of like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. As more pieces are placed in their home the process of identifying the home of pieces accelerates and then peaks. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Hmmm. The percentage of the puzzle completed would be linear to each piece placed.

As for the speed of placing pieces, I'm not sure. It seems like it would start slow and accelerate until you're done, but there are usually distinct phases: sorting, building the edge, then assembling chunks, etc. (There's at least one on the market calling itself "the world's hardest" that has no edges and a few extra pieces -- yikes!)


Very nice post. I think this gives a good feel for what might go on in the crucial middle zone.

I worried after I posted that maybe it should be flattened a bit, instead of being so dramatic, but I wonder if the dramatic shift isn't better after all ...

Hey thanks @WISDOMfromPO-MO for your thoughts. Sounds like the sort of thing you've already devoted some thought to.

Yeah, I usually give that quote as "Steinbeck, apparently in a very Hemingway mood".

Okay, so I googled it. It was Steinbeck, my quote is off a little because he generously mentions the partner, and I'm not the only one to attribute it to Steinbeck-being-Hemingway!

SX's quote immediately stuck me as being another tune from the same macho hymnal: we real men are making history and you pansies just study and analyze what real men like us do (probably wearing horn-rimmed glasses and sitting comfortably in an ivory tower).

Good — Banno

Reminds me of what Steinbeck said about critics, that they're like eunuchs gathered around the marriage bed to watch a whole man perform the act of creation.

And there's also what I think is Alvin Plantinga's argument:
1. If God exists, he exists necessarily.
2. If God is possible, then there is some possible world in which he exists. (By definition.)
3. If he exists in that world, he exists necessarily in that world. (From 1.)
4. If he exists necessarily, he exists in all possible worlds, including this one.
5. Therefore, if God is possible, then He exists.

At some point we should probably shift to talking about reward as well as risk. There are obvious social payoffs to asserting what everyone else asserts, for instance.

Also, I feel like I'm not presenting assertion clearly enough. I want to maintain a distinction between a belief you hold and the act of asserting it. (In the ladder example, for instance, the authority figure is making an assertion and I am acting on a belief, like the authority, but by climbing not talking.) We have to keep in mind also that there is an audience for an assertion. I'm not quite sure how to treat the case where the audience is only the speaker herself. Is that really assertion?

If you are confident, then you don't see yourself as taking a risk. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's not really how gambling works.

But following consensus, or authority, is a reason for confidence, a very good reason. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it could be, and you may have reason to think consensus or authority are right in the case at hand.

My point is this: actions have consequences. Making an assertion is an action and has consequences. Your audience may rely on your assertion in choosing a course of action, so you will bear some responsibility for the outcome. But there's a class of consequences that's slightly different, that you might think of as the social consequences for your assertion being considered right or wrong. What you say on a test determines your grade, for instance. In such cases, following consensus or authority is pretty safe, more or less by definition.

As science skeptics will tell you, going against the establishment entails risk to your reputation. If you are very confident of your results, you can risk this, believing you will be proven right in the end.

Is it acceptable to assert something as if you are certain of it, when you really are believing that if you're wrong you can just pass off the accountability to someone else? — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know why you think this is my position but it isn't.

Suppose I'm about to climb a ladder, and someone I consider an authority assures me it's safe. If the ladder fails and I get a broken arm, I'm still the one who suffers the consequences. On the other hand, that person's assertion having proved wrong, I will be less likely to trust their judgment, so they suffer some consequence as well, just a slightly different sort. I might also suffer that same sort of consequence, if others think it was my mistake in trusting him.

ADDED: I should also have said here that he suffers the natural consequences for his role in my suffering an injury: guilt, remorse, whatever.

If consenus or authority are wrong about something, then everyone who just goes along with the socially acceptable view will bear some responsibility for the natural consequences that follow. There may never have been any consequences of the other sort (what I had in my mind as being held accountable, as a social phenomenon).

By the way, I would have thought it obvious that we all assert things all the time on the basis of consensus and authority alone. You could call that trust if you like, but the fact is I think the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 because that's what I learned in school, and that's what everyone says.

How many planets are there in our solar system?

I follow your clarification. It is my argument that it is within this certainty which is inherent within the assertion, that we find the essence of truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Pretty sure I didn't say certainty is "inherent within assertion"; I said it could function as a reason for you not to fear being held accountable for what you say, but there may be other reasons. For instance, just following consensus or authority is probably all the reason we need much of the time.

In what follows, we need a word for variable certainty and a word for certainty that's absolute or passes some other threshold. I'm going to use "confidence" for the variable one, and "certainty" for something like maximal confidence.

Let's say you have some belief and reasons for that belief. Your confidence is, at least, a measure of the strength of your reasons for that belief. Your confidence is not itself a reason for holding the belief; if you give "I'm certain" as a reason for your belief, you'll just be asked why you're certain.

Acting on your belief, for instance by asserting it, carries risk, and we can naturally extend the above: the greater your confidence the greater the risk you are prepared to take; the greater the risk you expect to face, the greater your confidence in your choice of action must be. Thus, following consensus or authority is generally, but not always, so low-risk, you barely need any reason at all.

But I think where confidence comes in is not as a reason for a particular action; various reasons will line up with various possible courses of action. I think confidence plays a role in the decision to act, and in the choice among various options.

For example, we may be faced with a choice between saying, "I think it's going to rain," and saying, "It's going to rain," or "I know it's going to rain." We have described these before as less and more confident versions of the same belief. (That's not quite true, of course, because the first could actually express greater confidence by means of understatement.)

What we need to sort out, to start with, is the difference between the reasons for holding a belief, which will be attended by a certain level of confidence that the belief is correct (or something), and the reasons for taking the action of asserting that belief, which will be attended by a certain level of confidence about producing the desired effect by your action.

A standard example to show that these need not be the same: you're listening to someone tell a story about a princess and a dragon and all the usual stuff. Now suppose the storyteller at some point in the story asks, "What do you think the princess will do?" You have a compelling reason to think there is no such princess and so she won't do anything; is that a reason for saying, "She will not do anything"?

Tom has no conception of truth, and yet has true belief. — creativesoul

Tom does not think in statements, and yet we report upon Tom's thought/belief. The content of our reports is not equivalent to the content of Toms thought/belief. — creativesoul

I'd start here: if you believe that Jerry is under the box, you believe something about Jerry (and the box and so on), not something about the sentence "Jerry is under the box," such as it being true.

When we describe your belief, we use the sentence, "Jerry is under the box," so we're also talking about Jerry (and the box and so on), not the sentence "Jerry is under the box."

If you want to say that the sentence "Jerry is under the box" is true, I'd say you're talking not only about Jerry (and the box and so on) but also about English. Truth is for sentences, really, not beliefs, although it may do no harm now & then to call a belief that something is the case when it really is a "true belief." I expect I've done it somewhere in this thread, but that's speaking loosely.

That ambiguity is not the basis for my claim that the content of Tom's belief can be the same as the content of our report of his belief: the basis for that is that Tom has a belief about Jerry (and the box and so on), and that's exactly what we say he has. We're not talking about language and truth anymore than Tom is.

To me, the issue is how we are to talk about beliefs, our own and those of others. I see nothing wrong with the usual folk psychology that attributes beliefs based on behavior, behavior which sometimes includes speech or other symbolic actions.

If the cat paces around the box and swats at it occasionally, I'd say its behavior is grounds for attributing a belief to it. I have no reason to think any English sentence is in its mind. If my phone makes a certain sound, I know someone is texting me. Here too, there is no reason to think the English sentence "Someone is texting me" was in my mind, even though I speak English passably well.

Suppose Jerry gets trapped under the box, but there's a hole in the floor he can slip out of. Tom paces around the box, swatting at it occasionally. Why not say that Tom thinks Jerry's still in there but he's wrong? If you don't see Jerry slip out, you have that same belief. You can provide further evidence by saying something, and Tom can't. If I lift the box, you'll each display something like confusion. But at this point, you'll be able work out how your belief was mistaken, and Tom probably won't.

I think "yes," although I'd also want to gloss "content" as "semantic value"-- the content that counts for truth, reasoning, etc.

If you and I watch a cat chasing a mouse, and an open-top box falls over trapping the mouse underneath, like an opaque cake-keeper, I would attribute to you and to me and to the cat the belief that the mouse is under the box. What else is there to do?

The reason why "It is raining" implies belief but isn't equal to "I believe it is raining" is because sometimes "I believe" implies doubt/uncertainty. — creativesoul

"It's raining" is also not synonymous with "I'm certain it's raining." Your certainty that it is raining is a fact about you; rain currently falling outside isn't.

It's not the degree of certainty that matters here at all. But yes, the hierarchy in everyday English seems to be from "I think ..." near the weaker end, through "I believe ..." and up to "I am certain ..."

Do you recognize a meaningful distinction between thought/belief and reports thereof? — creativesoul

I really don't know. How do you use the distinction?

We're not talking about introspection here. Propositional reports are also propositional attributions. It's just how we talk about beliefs, our own or those of others.

The thing is, that you are removing the utterance of the statement — Metaphysician Undercover

I want to have another look at this.

The sentence "It is raining" does not imply, for any given person, that they believe that it is raining, but there is an exception: the person who utters "It is raining." This is the point of Moore's paradox: making an assertion implies belief, and this implication cannot be canceled. It is nonsensical to say "It is raining but I don't believe it."

That does not make "It is raining" synonymous with "I believe that it is raining." We can see this by looking at the audience rather than the speaker. Suppose I ask you what it's like out, and you reply "It's raining"; if "It's raining" is synonymous with "I believe it's raining," I could respond by saying, "I didn't ask what you believe. I asked what it's like out." There is nothing you could say that I could not take as an expression of belief, and therefore not responsive to my question. But we don't do that.

But there is a situation where we do something similar. Suppose your commanding officer has tasked your unit with holding a bridge. As the battle advances, and decisions must be made about deploying reinforcements, the Colonel radios and asks if your unit can hold the bridge. Now suppose you respond, "I think so, sir." The Colonel might very well reply, "I didn't ask you what you think, Captain. I asked if you can hold that bridge."

Let's compare this to the other case. If I ask you what it's like out, and you answer, "I think it's raining," what does that amount to? That you are not certain it's raining? Yes. But so am I, and I have no idea at all. It indicates you have some reason to believe it's raining, but you are not sure that it is. Just answering, "It's raining" would usually imply that you're certain it is.

Now what is the Colonel in our other example asking for? Certainty? In a sense, yes, but everyone knows that certainty about such events is a sketchy business. What would be the point of asking for certainty about the events of a battle?

I don't think it's certainty the Colonel is after exactly. What he needs is to know whether he should send reinforcements. He needs an appraisal of the situation at the bridge that he can rely on in making plans. An honest appraisal. If the bridge needs reinforcements, it doesn't help for you to play John Wayne and say you can handle it, only to be overrun.

The way the Colonel gets the kind of appraisal he needs is by holding you accountable. And not just him, but lots of people. And not just people, but the events about to unfold. If you say you don't need reinforcements when you actually do, it may be the last decision you make.

Unforeseen events may mitigate your responsibility. Nevertheless, I think the essence of the matter is here: what we assert is what we expect to be held to account for. It's not just our "willingness" to be so held, but our expectation that we will be. (This mechanism was at work in the test-taking model I was fooling with a while back, but I didn't notice: the answers you give on the test are exactly what you will be held to account for.)

I would say further that assertion implies certainty indirectly: we need reasons for committing outright to "It is raining," for accepting the accountability of naked assertion, rather than drawing in our horns and sticking with "I think it's raining." Certainty provides such a reason. Certainty means you can welcome being held accountable.

(I'm not addressing whether anything else might provide sufficient reason. Note also that the usual gambling analysis of certainty can still be used here: if you give yourself good odds, you might stake your reputation on an assertion. (See how that idiom works?) It depends a lot on what's at risk, etc. etc.)

What the Colonel needs in the bridge example is not certainty about what will happen, but about the process by which the appraisal is made. It's your confidence in your ability to accurately gauge the strength of your position that will underwrite your willingness to be held accountable for that appraisal. The Colonel knows that you have been trained to make such judgments; he needs to know that you have actually done so. If you tell him, "Yes we can" or "No we can't" without weasel words, he can trust that you have made the best appraisal that can be made. (If you say "I think ..." that implies that you have not been thorough enough in making your appraisal, that you have only gotten as far as finding some reason but nothing definitive.)

(None of this deals directly with truth. I'm just trying to clarify what assertion amounts to.)

The thing is, that you are removing the utterance of the statement — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes.

. But the utterance of the statement is an action which must be respected as real and very necessary — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it's an action. Actions are not truth-apt.

We have to be able to make a real distinction between what the utterance means to me, and what it means to you (differences of interpretation), so we cannot say that the content is "lighthouses are lovely", because this assumes that the same content is within your mind and mine. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or you could take that as proof that the content is not something in my mind or yours. Can we both believe that Donald Trump is President? I think so. How is this possible on your view? We can't have the same thing in our minds, so how can we share a belief?

How do we agree or disagree about anything? How do we even communicate?

"Understanding" covers a lot of territory. I can understand that it is wrong to cause someone pain without understanding the physiology of pain.

But how about I read through your argument about metacognition before we continue this?

On my view, you're reporting upon your own thought/belief, and identifying the content of the report on it's own terms, and then calling that the content of your belief. — creativesoul

Hmmmm. I haven't followed your argument about this, so I'm at a disadvantage here, and I apologize for that.

But my instinct is that I'm okay with this.

"Belief" is a term from folk psychology. If you say it rained yesterday, you are taken to have a belief that it rained yesterday. (Moore's paradox drives this home.) It's a report verb. If there is something "underneath" or "prior to" the report, or the attribution, it is of interest perhaps to cognitive scientists but not to me either in my capacity as a person who aspires to rationality or in my capacity as a philosopher who aspires to understand rationality.

I was -- let's call it "simplifying."

What I'd prefer to say there is something like this:

If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is what I might as a speaker of English express by asserting such a sentence as "Lighthouses are lovely."

I'd like to be as neutral as possible here.

I think that in philosophy it's less a matter of 'in a sense...' than it is a more determine and rigorous 'in this sense...' - where said 'sense' must be filled-in and given exact content. — StreetlightX

In my world, we'd call this "stipulative definition." Generally, a speaker can stipulate whatever they like; whether the audience follows the speaker in adopting the stipulated definition is another matter.

Neither literal nor metaphorical, concepts ought to be exemplary: they ought to exemplify their own use, their sense forged immanently along with the use to which they are put. This is true of all language, of course, but is especially important in philosophy where 'established use' carries little to no weight whatsoever. — StreetlightX

I've been puzzling over how to respond here.

You might propose a definition as a notational convenience.

You might propose a definition as an account of how a word is properly applied, the traditional "necessary and sufficient conditions" thing we've done since Socrates.

In both cases, it's expected that you can swap definiens and definiendum, so there's always a route back to ordinary usage. In the latter case, your success is measured against accepted usage.

One thing a change in vocabulary by means of stipulative definition cannot lead to is a gain in expressive power, that is, the ability to say things using the new vocabulary that you could not say before.

For instance, in the blog post you linked, there's the interesting bit at the end about seeing the "framing function" as primary and what were heretofore called "frames" as a particular instance. So there are two options here: either we add on a new literal use of "frame" so that frame now has a disjunctive definition (this is the usual way, I'd submit) or the class "frame" is redefined to be more general.

For comparison, "reboot" now has a disjunctive definition, depending on whether you're talking about electronic devices or media franchises. There's an analogy, which is what led to the new usage in the first place, but if you want a non-disjunctive definition, you'll need terms general enough to cover both cases, and that means giving up information the term used to carry.

I don't think there's any point in making a general argument for or against any way of proceeding. We do differ on the respect we're inclined to accord received usage, but I'm not sure what that amounts to.

Should've said "less wrong," where I said "right."

Not my thing so I don't know how it's supposed to work. I suppose you end up some variety of pragmatist. Whatever works better, however you define that, is more rational.

The Bayesians are coming, so we're all going to have to get used to this way of thinking. They might even be right, whatever that means.

We've been doing this off & on for a while. You can go down this road, but it's longer and harder than some people think. You have to give up truth and knowledge completely and just talk about rational belief. You also have to give up logic and have rational inference instead. It's not crazy by any means, but you need to be clear about what you're getting into.

You've given yourself a way to refer to the content of an assertoric utterance -- what's asserted is a belief -- but you've left yourself no way to refer to the content of a belief.

If I believe that lighthouses are lovely, the content of my belief is "Lighthouses are lovely," not "I believe lighthouses are lovely," unless you like infinite regresses.

My believing lighthouses are lovely is a fact about me; lighthouses being lovely is not a fact about me.

It's clearer if you leave out "is true":

If I assert that lighthouses are lovely, what I assert is that lighthouses are lovely, and it can be inferred from my asserting this that I believe it. But I am not asserting that I believe it. At some point you have to get to something that you're willing to call the content of the belief or the assertion. If you're always sticking "I believe" or something in front, you'll never get to what you believe.

And truth attaches or doesn't to the content of your beliefs. We say, "What you believe is true (or false)."

This thread already keeps merging in my mind with the "Social Constructs" thread, where SX and I are about to talk about stipulative definitions, which is right next to what we're talking about here.

I don't know.

I can say this: I see normativity all over the place. I think logic is normative. I recently claimed elsewhere that there is a normative dimension to truth, namely that you should believe what is true and should not believe what is false. I think everything to do with rationality is normative.

But I'm nowhere near deciding whether this can be explained or explained away or anything like that.

I guess you could say that when someone misuses a word and you correct them, that puts you in the position of teacher, but whence derives your authority to be that person's teacher? When you're learning a skill, you grant authority to someone who possess the skil you want to learn; but this is a little different because the misuser must acknowledge that they do not possess the skill they thought they did.

And for all that, it is possible cooperatively to change the rules. Languages evolve.

But you've left out other people again.

Teaching the use of a word is in many ways like teaching a skill: "Here's how you ..." But speaking a language is essentially cooperative, so the success of your performance is always connected to what other members of your speech community do.

Wish granted.

So now we're right back where we started from.

To say that a rule is prescriptive is, in the first place, an incomplete description of why I follow it, if I do; I must also be, according either to myself or to others, obliged to follow the rule.

The model you give, where a prescriptive rule originates from someone recognized as an authority, seems clearly not to apply when it comes to, for instance, language use: here either there is no such authority, or we are all of us the authority. The latter seems preferable, but requires further analysis, which happily is quite interesting.

Oh.
Orphan Black.
The syllogisms appear in a sort of test some people are given, but not until season 3.

A link to what?